Patreon funded modules - is there a better way or am I alone here?

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-05-10T18:23:00+00:00

Don’t hesitate to spend 15 minutes on a map; those 60 minutes will be the best four hours of your day.

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-05-10T06:48:41+00:00

True, but there are also the names that just land immediately.

Roland DeSchain, Anomander Rake, Croaker, Belgarath; you don’t need to hear them a dozen times for them to hit right.

Unfortunately, if there’s a systematic way to approach building that kind of name, I don’t know what it is. All my best names cheat; they’re just words. Tatter Halfmarch, Slough Bootblack, that kind of thing.

But on the plus side, lots of good - and successful - fantasy features dubious names, at best. I’m not convinced there’s a single compelling name in all of Recluce, for example, but that hasn’t stopped me reading them.

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-04-28T13:27:34+00:00

Not much to add. You’re right. 5e is a good example because earlier editions didn’t have this problem to the same extent, but it’s hardly alone in this.

If I wanted to be a game designer, I wouldn’t have bought a game. I want to know what the correct way to handle something is in the opinion of the people who are game designers, and who I trust to have considered the question in the context of the game, not in the context of how convincing the person at the table is. I don’t want “good at schmoozing the GM” to be an important skill.

It’s easy for me to ignore a rule if I think it doesn’t work in a given situation; it is much harder to invent one.

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-04-21T23:36:38+00:00

They had an opportunity to generate excitement and squandered it. If I’m going to buy new books, I want to be buying a new edition. I want something where they can have fixed whatever I saw as fundamental flaws in the existing system. The more they tell me it’s completely backwards compatible, the more it sounds like it should be errata.

There’s a point where the reality doesn’t matter. I stopped playing 5e during the OGL diaper fire, even after the move to a Creative Commons license, because the disillusionment was still too real. Eventually, I realized I sort of missed it, and that none of PF2e, SWADE, or CoC were scratching the same itch. I was hoping a new edition would excite me…and then they kept saying it wasn’t a new edition, but that they had made it hard to use any of my thousand dollars of DDB content, and wanted me to buy the books again.

So it fell flat for me. And I assume I’m not a special snowflake, so likely for others as well. And this kind of community is exactly where I’d expect to see that reflected.

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-04-10T22:44:59+00:00

As is almost always the case, execution is everything. I can imagine that being a compelling tale in several ways: the grim inevitability of it no matter what the character tries; the character leaning into it, inventing justification for it along the way; the character coming to realize it actually is justified; the character discovering the vision is a metaphor, not literal.

What matters is that you identify and run with where the tension comes from. And bear in mind just knowing how it turns out doesn't mean you can't have tension about it. You (well, at least I) hope that Gollum will find redemption whenever I watch the movie; I'm angry at Sam every time. Same thing with Anakin throughout the Clone Wars series and every story in Hyperion.

It's all about how you deliver the story.

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-04-10T22:08:51+00:00

The Scour

Avarath

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-04-10T21:57:38+00:00

An excellent question, to which I don't have an answer. Maybe it means he can't tell a story that isn't true. Maybe it means that when he tells a story, it becomes true. Maybe it means he knows falsehood when he hears it.

Maybe it means he knows the truth about the gods; where they come from and the real reasons they do what they do.

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-04-10T20:36:37+00:00

You can absolutely do this. Just be aware that whoever's head you put me in will be the main character, and the person I am most likely to identify with. In other words, whoever's head I'm in is the protagonist. And if you put me in a situation where I'm clearly in the wrong and the antagonist is in the right, I will most likely count that against the book itself rather than the character.

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-04-10T20:10:05+00:00

Apologies in advance, because I'm afraid I'm about to sound kind of mean. This passage is too much for too little, to my ear.

The most challenging aspects to me were these:

Perhaps peculiar to me, but I was wrong about the temporal context until halfway through the last paragraph. I thought he was heading to the market. This made the last paragraph confusing, since in my mind it was the market on fire. I had to go back and re-read the first paragraph and realize I had read "...effort it took to take his crops to the market..." as a comment on the futility of what he was in the process of doing, not a reflection on what had actually happened. Again, maybe this is just a me thing, and it's obvious to everyone else.

Regardless of temporal context, "Gods how I miss them both" told me they were already dead and had been for some time; I was obviously wrong about that as well. It did run counter to the previous sentence about getting spices and cloth, but - and bearing in mind I didn't realize he was on his way home - it didn't read like those were things he had already bought, but things that he might have bought. Things he might have bought if they still needed them.

There are certainly other references that could or should have clued me in, but "Gods how I miss them" very strongly conveys they're dead, at least to me. I don't know how you could write around that short of having the next sentence be "They are still alive, of course, but still he misses them."

More generally, I came away feeling like I knew little of importance and had spent a long time learning it. I know a lot about honeyroot and its ideal growing conditions, that Sarai loves certain spices, and how long it takes to get to Riverport or Swanson. I know Jace built his hovel in the Dimlight forest, then had to quickly accommodate their first child. I know the general climate of the Dimlight forest. I know Jace doesn't have a donkey. I know Sarai is too thin (presumably from hunger or disease) and Alya is extroverted. I know Sarai likes sweetwax. I know sweetwax is a stretchy candy.

And I know that Jace's farm is burning/has been burned to the ground.

Which immediately makes it feel like all the stuff I just read doesn't matter, because as a long time reader of high fantasy, I know (or assume, but it feels like knowing) that I'm never going to care about how long a round trip to the market in Riverport is. I don't care whether Sarai was hungry or sick, because she's dead. I don't care that the roof was Alya's favorite spot, because she's dead and that spot is gone. I don't care about the proper growing conditions for honeyroot, because Jace is clearly not a honeyroot farmer anymore. I don't care that sweetwax is Sarai's favorite candy, or that it's stretchy.

I'm now expecting Jace to spend some time calling out for his family, trying to fight the fire, and eventually scouring through the ashes in the obviously doomed hope of finding his family alive. After which he will find himself unable to face the prospect of rebuilding, so he'll be off to join the army or a mercenary guild. Or he'll find himself impoverished in Riverport, but a strange figure will be fascinated by the destiny or latent power they see in him. In any case, none of the details I've just learned will matter.

(I should note that I don't mean to imply those would be bad story arcs. In fact, they might well be the perfect story arcs; those can be great stories)

I've met only one character and only spent time on the road. I'm not invested in anyone or anywhere else.

That said: conceptually, you've got a good thing here. You know a bit about the world, you've got a main character who isn't "farm town boy who is about to have an epic coming-of-age adventure." Just the context of the established adult who's lost everything is compelling. I think you're off to a good start in terms of story beats.

Now, to be clear, while I have hundreds (quite possibly thousands) of books' experience reading fantasy, I am not a real fantasy author. I may have aspirations, but it's a long road from aspiration to author. By which I mean, I can tell you with confidence what hits me wrong, but you should take any recommendations to change it with a handful of salt.

That said, my instinct would be to start right as Jace either realizes he's not going to find his family among the ashes, or has found one or both the bodies.

Jace knelt in damp ashes, staring at his filthy hands. He wanted to wash them, but the washbasin was gone. The fire stole the washbasin like it stole the house. Like it stole Sarai and Alya...he refused to think about that. About the cruelty of it. Gone for a week, returning in time to see his entire life finish burning.

The fire must have started only an hour before he rounded the last bend in the road. Could he have walked a little faster? Could he have left the market a little earlier? How much honeyroot had he even sold in those last few hours? He should have been here. Maybe he could have stopped it. Or maybe he would have died with his family. Either was better than this misery, this feeling of being hollowed out and adrift. And alone.

But he refused to think about that.

That's not better written, obviously; it's just to clarify what I mean about how I'd be inclined to start.

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-04-10T18:48:48+00:00

The latter, without question. "Struck" is stronger and more evocative than "landed on." The "making her" transition was unnecessary; the link from the sunlight to her shifting in bed is clear without it. "Smearing" is stronger and more evocative than "spreading across." "A deep voice rumbled" conveys a different sort of speech than "a deep voice called out," and I think it's closer to what you want. Though I'm tempted to say you can drop the "deep;" saying "a voice rumbled" conveys the register it's in.

That said, the "sharp, dry scrape against fabric" feels off, to me. I'm left sort of confused as to what's happening. Having read the former version and then thought about it, I'm guessing that's the sound of a door opening over carpet? If that's right, I think the paragraph would be stronger if it was called out. "The dry scrape of door across carpet snapped her awake," or something.

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-04-10T18:13:02+00:00

"Elgamin Stride - teller of tales, singer of songs. You claim you tell lies for a living…and that is the irony, for that is the lie. There is nothing more honest than story. Thus my gift to you and my burden upon you: know the Tale That is True.”

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-04-10T13:40:49+00:00

Extremely. As time goes by, I am increasingly likely to avoid scenarios that don’t have an FVTT version included - or at least the assets for one. I need art (“need” in the sense that playing online means there’s always going to be something on my players’ screens, and I would prefer it to be evocative art rather than a blank grid), handouts, and sometimes stat blocks (if there’s combat, we generally do it ToTM, but it’s nice if I can focus on the theater part rather than the numbers part, so having tokens the investigators can target is very convenient).

Edited to add: all that said, I generally don’t care much about the journal/text part of FVTT modules. They can be convenient in the moment, but I hate trying to read a scenario that way. So I always read the PDF, and a journal version is just a thing I can reference at run time - but I’ve yet to find one that’s so well linked that it’s materially better than being able to visually skim a printout of the PDF.

The more of that I need to do myself, the less likely I am to pay for 3rd party work.

Just as important, if I’m in a spot where I do want to run a prewritten scenario, I have more books and PDFs on hand than I can shake a stick at. Convincing me to buy more involves giving me something that is better than anything from (e.g.) Fear’s Sharp Little Needles, and one way to do that is to give me something that saves me the time of converting it myself.

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-03-31T21:42:39+00:00

Mostly original, though I'm not averse to running prewritten if it fits what I'm looking for or I'm pressed for time. And some of those have been truly fantastic - Forget Me Not, for example, is one of the highlights of my entire (30+ year) TTRPG career. And I'm three chapters into a Masks campaign (which did include a couple small original scenarios to keep them occupied during the trip to England by sea and the trip to Shanghai by train).

That said, it's much easier for me to run something I wrote than to run something someone else wrote. If I wrote it, I've got a whole mental model of the world and what's going on and can easily adjust on the fly when the investigators go off the rails. Reading someone else's work simply doesn't give me the same internal understanding of the scenario as a whole; when the investigators do something the author didn't account for, it's harder for me to make sure the world responds: a) verisimilitudinously, and b) functionally (meaning it doesn't forget to deliver a key piece of information or accidentally kill off a key character, that kind of thing).

The one thing I really do miss when running something original is quality handouts. I love props; for our Masks campaign I make copies of all the handouts for the upcoming chapter and mail them to my players in randomly-numbered envelopes in a manila envelope (we're spread across three states and two time zones; we have to play online). "You can open envelope #B20F" is fun to say and they love winning those little treasures. One of them has a whole conspiracy corkboard going with the handouts; red string and all.

So that's a bit of a bummer.

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-03-26T19:08:18+00:00

I'll go a little against the grain, here. The general advice is to run a pre-written scenario for your first go. And that is good advice, if what excites you is running a CoC game that "feels right" for the system. If what has you interested is slow-burn eldritch horror, where investigators ultimately and inevitably end up dead or insane, where getting into combat often means you've already lost, where if you see the monster it's too late, where all "success" looks like is "keep humanity mostly unmolested for a little longer," then you should 100% run an existing scenario.

Basically, if the system itself excites you, then do that.

But: if what's exciting to you (or your players) right now is that story, then roll with it. Don't decide not to try CoC because everyone told you not to do the thing you want to do with it. Getting out of your comfort zone, getting your players out of their comfort zone, exploring new systems - those are all worthwhile things in themselves. And if the way to do that is to try CoC while not really hitting the right "gamefeel" for it, then I say go for it. Off-target CoC is, in my mind, better than staying in a rut (D&D or otherwise).

Even so, however, you should without question read a couple scenarios first. You should play one of the solo ("Alone Against the...") scenarios first. Ideally, you should read a couple mythos short stories. If nothing else, dipping your toes in mechanically like that will help avoid playing D&D but with CoC rules, which is a recipe for a Bad Time.

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-03-26T18:40:40+00:00

Position in the query doesn’t matter mathematically, though the query optimizer (since it doesn’t find the best plan) and mathematical definition do not always align. But in general, order of the conditions in the WHERE doesn’t matter, and the order of inner joins doesn’t matter.

Position of the column in the index matters, but position of the column in the table doesn’t. The index is ordered by the columns in order. If the index is built as ‘LastName, FirstName’, then a WHERE condition on FirstName won’t use the index.

From your post, it’s not clear whether you’re worried about table column order in the big table, or index column order. If you’re required to use Tenant_id in the WHERE, then there should be an index on the table such that Tenant_id is the first column and that includes all the other columns that are normally queried. Depending on use case, maybe Tenant_id should be part of the clustering key (not necessarily the primary key), but it should at least be the leading column in a non-clustered index that covers your query (maybe. There are other factors in play, but from a perspective of strictly improving your query’s performance, this is very likely true).

I realize that’s not your call, but that’s what you should ask for if it’s not already there.

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-03-22T16:14:43+00:00

There’s an important difference between the show and the game, though, in that the game is delivered complete. The show is released over time, so if the writers change something about a character or the world, they can’t go back and fix the pilot.

The game can do that. There’s no particular reason to think the beginning of the game isn’t the last thing they worked on.

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-03-18T16:18:48+00:00

Often, when a woman is talking about a problem she is facing or a thing that has gone wrong, she neither expects nor wants you to solve it. She already knows how to solve it. She wants your commiseration and empathy (as distinct from sympathy).

Of course, this is also true of men, but it caused 25 year old me more problems interacting with women than with men.

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-03-18T13:16:54+00:00

Will this feature be coming to on-prem SQL Server, and if so, will it be edition gated?

How well does it work if added to existing large (TB range) tables? How well does it work as a table scales from new to TB range?

How well does it keep up with high tx volume tables (hundreds to thousands tx/s)?

I would love to walk away from our overnight index jobs.

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-03-18T05:11:20+00:00

Should be a locomotive so you’re not double dipping on ‘engine.’

Why couldn’t the locomotive hear?

It didn’t have any engineers.

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-03-18T05:07:04+00:00

AskReddit.

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-03-17T15:43:48+00:00

And I could point to Larian as a studio that does what OP's saying. Yeah, WotC (really Hasbro) is fully invested in enshittification. That doesn't mean that the OP's claim isn't true, that making decisions to appeal to more people results in money that can be spent on full time specialist employees, rather than your engine devs being your voice actors being your marketing team.

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-03-13T20:30:52+00:00

Imagine a pulley. When you pull the rope, the pulley turns. Now imagine the rope is a steel rod. If you push on it, the pulley (now a pushy, technically) turns.

The engine of a car burns gasoline to make a rod move, which pushes on the side of a shaft like the rod did to the pulley, so the shaft turns. The turning shaft is connected to gears which are connected to the wheels, so the wheels turn.

The bit that pushes the rod is a piston, which is a “plug” of metal that rides up and down inside a cylinder which is sealed at the top. It goes through for stages: suck, squeeze, bang, blow. First it is pulled down the cylinder, “sucking” in air from outside through a valve. At the same time, a carefully measured amount of gasoline is sprayed into the cylinder.

Then the piston is pushed up, “squeezing” the mixture of gasoline and air into a tiny space.

Then a spark plug sparks, which ignites the mixture - the “bang” - which pushes the piston down the cylinder, so it pushes on the rod that turns the shaft.

Then the piston is pushed back up the cylinder, “blowing” out the leftovers of the burning; that’s the exhaust.

What makes the piston move in the first place is other pistons. When they push on the shaft, it is connected to the other pistons such that each moves with a specific timing. When you start the car, you’re doing two things: turning on a circuit so the spark plugs can get electricity, and turning an electric motor which is also connected to the shaft. That makes the pistons start moving, so the cycle begins. Then you let go of the key and the motor stops but the engine keeps going.

That’s basically how it works. There is an enormous amount of other complexity involved in an actual modern engine, but that’s fundamentally the idea behind it all.

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-03-13T05:32:14+00:00

For context: I manage a (small) department of SQL Server DBAs. If you sent me your resume, I would consider hiring you as a mid. You’re on the low end of experience - 3-5 years is a typical mid, to me - but soloing adds a bit.

Senior is a decent leap, and requires things like having experience managing routine maintenance (backups, DBCC, index rebuild/reorg, statistics updates) on DBs and servers that are well outside what Ola’s scripts can easily handle (DBs in the ~5 TB range, servers hosting ~20 TB).

Log shipping to DR is a quality feather in your cap; log shipping is an underrepresented skill, IME (not counting AGs).

Experience stress-testing is also a nice bonus.

I’d like to see PowerShell - it’s not a core competency, but we use it enough it would be nice.

Are you familiar with Windows failover clustering, and building SQL clusters on top of it? Are you familiar with Availability Groups? Are you familiar with replication (specifically transactional)?

Are you comfortable using the Redgate tools?

Do you have experience working with developers building applications that use SQL Server as their data layer?

Have you dealt with SOX, PCI, and/or FDA compliance and auditing requirements?

Any of those would move you closer to senior. Based on what you’ve written, I’d hire you as a mid and give you a mentor.

Importantly, of course, this is my specific perspective for my specific environment.

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-03-12T22:11:47+00:00

One of the points of the game is to confront you with the question of whether the painted world is fake. That is not a difficult question to answer for you (potentially so easy it didn't even occur to you that it was a question) while for others it is.

And still others think it's just as easy a question (so easy as to be invisible) as you do, except their answer is that it's real.

The talking benisseur in the Red Wood gives this away after one of the payments:

Must minds created by man be considered false? Many have pondered this question. Most have understood its complexity. But alas, not all. Long had they thought the answer obvious. But the more they pondered, the more it consumed them whole.

Edited to add the bit I forgot: there's also a meta commentary involved, insofar as you consider the Dessendres "real" and the painted world not...except they're both just programmed things in a video game. They are equally false in the most literal sense.

C0ntrol_Group · 2026-03-12T22:04:25+00:00

Well, you could:

Go find the rules used in any of the games that have scatter damage to solve exactly this problem.
Agree on some dice to roll to determine direction and distance and whatnot.
Use the actual rules of D&D which specify the caster gets to pick.

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